I trust that this week finds you all well. Spring break is upon us and before I prop my feet up for a relaxing week of working non-stop on my capstone, I deliver humbly to your eyeballs a helping of interesting reads to tide you over until next week.
First, we go to Bangladesh where the BBC reports on the long and storied history of Dhaka muslin and the effort to bring the real stuff back. The prized muslin, which was the center of a booming fabric trade in the small regions where it was exclusively manufactured using centuries-old processes, became a centerpiece of women’s fashion in the 18th century.
The exquisite muslin was said to be so fine that gentle ladies who wore it were thought to be appearing scandalously nude. As the imperial poets called it, it was “woven air.” That all changed when the British East India Company took over the practice and, slowly, gutted it in favor of an inferior but far more marketable plain cotton muslin, the manufacturing of which was then outsourced to the North of England. The former muslin-makers went back to subsistence agriculture and the practice died out. You can check out the article for an idea of how the restoration project is going. Maybe one day you can once again buy a 3000 thread-count sari from Bangladesh just like the Mughal emperors.
Another article that caught my eye was over at Aeon.com, written by University of Texas professor Kathryn Paige Harden. Harden wonders what is to be done with “The science of terrible men“? The article is the author’s attempt to wrestle with the fact that much of the foundational work in human genetics was done by proponents of “scientific” racism and eugenics. She summarizes:
A meta-analysis of results from 50 years of twin studies (including the twin study that I co-direct, the Texas Twin Project) concluded in 2015 that genes do, in fact, make a difference for these types of social and behavioural outcomes – for people’s cognitive ability, personality, sexual behaviour, educational attainment and income. In fact, this finding is so consistent that it’s long been enshrined as the ‘first law of behavioural genetics’: everything is heritable. That is, variation in every aspect of human psychology and behaviour, and variation in every social outcome that’s influenced by one’s behaviour, is influenced by the genetic differences among us. Despite making different assumptions from twin studies, GWAS results converge on the same answer: which genes you happen to inherit from your parents makes a difference for socially valued life outcomes, such as how far you go in school.
This entire line of research uses statistical tools and scientific insights from Fisher and other proponents of eugenics, such as the Victorian-era scientist Francis Galton (who redefined the study of heredity as the study of similarity between relatives) and the early 20th-century mathematician Karl Pearson (who is the namesake of the Pearson correlation coefficient). And, by connecting genetic differences between people to socially valued life outcomes, this line of research also risks entrenching their ideologies about human inferiority and superiority.
When a building is constructed out of concrete, the concrete is poured into formwork, a temporary mould that holds the poured concrete in shape until it hardens. The formwork is dismantled but the concrete retains its shape and texture. An evil belief in racial purity was the formwork for the science of genetics. What, now, do we do with the building?
But granted that, as Harden thinks, the research is clearly showing differences in heritable behaviors across populations, she ultimately concludes:
The eugenicist embraced the fear and loathing of the ‘other’ as natural and right, and attempted to destroy human differences that they considered subordinate. The reaction to eugenics for the past century has been to ignore those differences. As genetics knowledge rapidly accumulates by the day, Lorde’s challenge to relate across our human differences as equals becomes more urgent. We can’t put off the task of developing an egalitarian anti-eugenics any longer.
The question of genetic differences between human populations is a highly charged political question, and Harden deals with it more or less honestly and fairly. The whole article is an interesting read.
And in a surprising twist, I won’t assign you anymore reading! Only two stories this week, curtesy of Spring Break.
